2024 in review and looking ahead
Since Double Union moved to 650 Florida St #M in November 2023, we’ve been growing our membership and activities, and really enjoying this location for our unique, friendly community workshop space. We’re excited to share this recap of 2024, how our funding is looking right now, and our plans for 2025.
We’re asking for your support! As described below, we currently cover about 60% of our expenses via member dues, and we would love your help for the other 40%. We continue to rebuild after many of our members moved away during the pandemic, and your one-time or recurring donations are incredibly helpful. You can give money via PayPal or keep reading for more ways to support this space.
Double Union’s core offering is affordable access to art/craft workspace, including equipment and supplies, in a fun and comfortable environment with intersectional feminist values. Together, members build this space for solidarity, friendship, and joy among nonbinary people, trans women, and cis women, where all of us are equally welcome and share in leadership together. The in-person nature of the space helps to foster community and hands-on skills, and to counter loneliness. With a membership that is approximately 60% LGBTQ+, DU offers an alternative form of queer social space.
We maintain a mask requirement for members and guests, including to protect those of us who have health conditions or have family and friends who are vulnerable to COVID. The majority of the space is accessible, with an ADA-compliant bathroom. The physical environment is clean, well-ventilated, and up-to-code, with heating available for cold days. The supplies are pretty well organized!
Our board makes sure that the rent gets paid and the insurance gets renewed, along with doing things like writing this blog post, but most decision-making is member-led and cooperative. DU is a “prefigurative” space where members can practice ways of organizing and relating to each other that we want to see in society.
We hosted several workshops and intro classes, along with skill sharing sessions. These included laser cutting, sewing machines, screen printing, book binding, zine making, DIY felt garlands, crocheting, and coding. These informal workshops create opportunities for people to try something new, meet friendly people, and just enjoy something for a few hours with others who value creative learning. We also hosted an open house with several activities as part of SF Design Week.
We hosted several open craft project times for people to work on their projects, including evenings and afternoons, along with a series of coworking afternoons. This helps people make time to focus on their creative projects, along with sharing what they’re working on with a friendly audience and getting creative energy from being around others who are working on things.
Double Union community events included a Halloween party, our annual member meeting where we collaborated on vision and goals for the year, space maintenance/organizing/tidying time, and leadership meetings open to interested members.
Where our funding comes from
While we aim for membership dues to cover the majority of expenses, we also want DU to be affordable for everyone who is interested, especially because SF is a very high cost-of-living city. Dues are sliding-scale, between $0/month and $100/month. All members have unlimited access to the space, equipment, and events. Most of our events and workshops are member-led and completely free. This is an amazing deal – many other makerspaces and coworking spaces in SF/Oakland charge a minimum of $100-200/month.
We currently have 135 members, with 93 paying at least $10/month and 42 paying $0 due to financial need. Current dues income is $1,720/month, which covers 60% of expenses.
To cover the difference between membership dues and operating expenses, we ask for donations periodically. Our last fundraising drive in summer of 2023 helped cover the costs of moving to our current space in the Mission (our former landlord sold the unit we rented in SOMA) and a few months of operating expenses.
We don’t have grant funding, government funding, or corporate sponsors, so every individual donation is meaningful for our space. On an ongoing basis, we need sufficient one-time or recurring donations to cover 40% of monthly expenses. We continue to recruit new members, so that percentage should decrease over time.
What we spend the money on
Members have kept DU alive since 2013 by keeping costs low. It is entirely volunteer-run. We spend about $2910/month. 92% goes to direct expenses for the space:
For $2400/month, we rent a market-rate ground-floor commercial unit in an affordable housing building owned by the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation, a local nonprofit. This means that our rent money supports housing in San Francisco.
Utilities add about $280/month.
We spend $230/month on insurance and administrative software, such as a bookkeeping tool and a virtual mailbox.
We spend a small amount on supplies, such as printer paper and filters for the air purifiers. If we need something, we figure out how to find it cheap or get it as a donation.
Our plan is to keep growing! Members have been orienting new members and helping other members host events. The board is working to recruit new board members to continue our practice of rotating leadership every 2-3 years. We have a great location in the Mission, Âľ mile from 16th St BART. Our lease goes through October 2026, so we have some very welcome stability.
We believe it is important to continue to be a warm and welcoming space for projects, friendly acquaintances, interesting ideas, activism, and more, especially as we look ahead to difficult times.
Double Union is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, so your donations are tax-deductible to the extent of the law. Our nonprofit filings can be found at the Registry of Charitable Trusts (search by organization name or EIN 46-3264631). You can:
Donate via PayPal (one-time or monthly recurring donations).
Grant via your donor-advised fund in Schwab, Fidelity, Vanguard, and other platforms. Email [email protected] if you need a contact person's name and phone number.
Mail a check to our mailing address (which is different from our physical address): Double Union, 2443 Fillmore St #380-8811, San Francisco, CA 94115.
Set up matching donations via your company – we're registered with Benevity.
Give gently-used clothes, household goods, furniture, books, and other items to Community Thrift (623 Valencia St) and ask them to designate the proceeds to benefit Double Union (partner #153). Review their donation tips, including acceptable and unacceptable items. They can also pick up furniture within SF.
If you can gift advertising credits on Facebook/Instagram or Google, we can use them to promote the space to potential new members. Email [email protected].
If you’re a Ruby on Rails programmer, we could use help maintaining our homegrown open source web application.
Apply to become a member! Or if you’re already a member, consider hosting a workshop or event, or helping with cleanup and organization during one of our maintenance day events.
